Small Business Trends caught up with Rebekah King, director of marketing systems for Cox Automotive at Salesforce’s recent Dreamforce event in San Francisco. Cox Automotive is a company that helps dealers and other automotive businesses digitize their marketing and sales processes. So King is uniquely familiar with how technology can help businesses of all sizes. But just because technology can be helpful doesn’t mean you should just adopt every tech tool out there right away.

In fact, King says that Cox Automotive’s strategy is more about taking small steps. And she thinks it’s a model that can work really well for companies of all sizes, no matter how big the vision might be.

Step-By-Step Technology Implementation

King said, “We may have a big vision about unifying our client experience. But we get there through putting one foot in front of the other in a very small and practical way. And one day you’ll look up after doing that and see that you’ve put together a whole program that is really moving your business forward but you didn’t spend seven months figuring it out or two years formulating the strategy. You just spent three weeks on that one piece.”

So for small businesses looking to shape a tech adoption strategy, King’s advice is to choose one small thing to focus on. Then make that small change and execute it fully before moving onto the next thing.

King added, “The very practical thing is to just take one piece of the functionality you want to be able to do. If you want to do lead nurturing — lead nurturing is a huge end-to-end vision. So just start with one part of that.”